Yesterday’s lesson on Sidney turned out better than I deserved. ?Because I’m more interested in intellectual history than I am in court intrigue, I’ve not spent as much time as I probably should have on Sidney’s works and biography. ?(O Reader, if only you could see the depths of the understatements in that last sentence.)? Nonetheless, with some careful sonnet selections, I managed to put together a day of Sidney consisting of some Astrophil sonnets that are clearly influenced by Dante (which, of course, gave me occasion to talk about Dante) and a hefty chunk of Defense of Poesy (or Apology for Poetry or Defense of Poetry or however our anthology lists it).
I realized while I was planning the lesson that I’d never before taught a class on what lit crit actually does.? S
o we started out rehearsing the high points of the text, where he asserts poetry’s dual ends of education and entertainment (or teaching and delight, if one must use the same cognates as Sidney does), puts rhyme and meter to the side as decoration and puts story-making at the center of the poetic enterprise, and articulates poetry’s role in moral formation.? Then I had my students take on a couple of tasks: they had to say where Sidney got things most right and demonstrate it with the texts we’d read thus far in class, and they had to point to inadequacies in Sidney’s theory, again testing them against the literary phenomena.? My students, a bright group, quickly noted that Sidney’s strongest point is about the instrumental character of literature–the same techniques of combining letters and words can inspire virtue and vice, and moreover the same text of some complexity can lead two different readers in very different directions.? (Sidney internalized the morality of poetry by blaming the viewer in cases where comedies made people want to emulate rather than laugh at the vicious.)
On the inadequacy side, my students gravitated towards the rather simplistic theory of the ways literature forms moral character.? Sidney holds that a poem about Aeneas is superior to a historical account of Caesar because the history will mix moments of exemplary conduct with the brute facts of any historical figure’s shortcomings (he’s obviously talking about Livy-style history rather than the propaganda that sometimies passes for biography) but that a poem can produce a unified picture of exemplary human life.? My students noted, rightly, that the best moral instruction that literature offers is not from simplistic stories featuring uniformly good characters (which are dull if not unbelievable) but from stories and dramas of some complexity in which the audience and reader must do some of the heavy lifting, morally speaking.? We also noted that even the persona Astrophil has more depth than what Sidney offers in his theory and that, while we can commend his theory in several ways, he should have paid more attention to the actual phenomena on that point.
And so the stage was set for me to give an account of literary criticism strongly influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions–although there’s not nearly the sense of a unified “normal science” in lit crit, nonetheless the practice is at its best when, taking account of the texts at hand, people propose manners to organize the elements of literary texts and relationships between elements, knowing well enough that the theory likely won’t finish the discussion but nonetheless that a theory well-stated might help the next reader down the pike make some more sense of it.? Such is not to rule out various schools of criticism but to note that, though those schools differ on many important questions, there are enough family resemblances (in the Wittgensteinian sense) among them that they stand to help one another if anyone can slow down and listen for a moment.
